Comparison between MRI-based attenuation correction methods for brain PET in dementia patients

The combination of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in hybrid PET/MRI scanners offers a number of advantages in investigating brain structure and function. A critical step of PET data reconstruction is attenuation correction (AC). Accounting for bone in attenuation maps (μ-map) was shown to be important in brain PET studies. While there are a number of MRI-based AC methods, no systematic comparison between them has been performed so far. The aim of this work was to study the different performance obtained by some of the recent methods presented in the literature. To perform such a comparison, we focused on [18F]-Fluorodeoxyglucose-PET/MRI neurodegenerative dementing disorders, which are known to exhibit reduced levels of glucose metabolism in certain brain regions